Arabic authors

[Lastoadri]

Dear all,
I am a bit confused, should I add Arabic authors in Arabic or English?

And in case I must add authors in English, please advise me because Arabic pronunciation is different than English; So in most cases you can find more than 3 ways to write the same Arabic name. In addition to that, there isn’t any clear reference to referee to for a unified Arabic writing.
Like: Abdel Rahman == Abd El Rahman == Abd Al Rahman == Abd-El-Rahman == AbdElRahman…. Etc..

So is there a way to combine Authors to make search much easier?
I mean, we would have 1 page for an author written in Arabic, and other ones for all available ways to write a name in English.


Wish you would help.

lasto

[Cait]

Lastoadri,

This is a question with no good answer right now, I'm afraid. There is no way yet to combine authors without deleting one of them.

It sounds like you're adding books that list the authors in Arabic, so it would make sense to add the authors that way. (You might want to check a few of the possible transliterations to see if the author is already listed, though!)

If there are author listings with multiple spellings, the usual practice right now so that people can find all of the author's books is to edit the various author profiles and place a note in the bio indicating the various spellings. If some variants are obviously preferred over others, you can shift the less-preferred spellings to the more-preferred ones -- if you do this by editing the author profile and changing the spelling there, all of the books will automatically be shifted and then the less-preferred spelling will be deleted.

(Remember that you can't combine editions and translations if the first author's name is spelled differently. Sometimes it makes sense to list the author twice, once with each spelling, so that the first author is the same for combining purposes but the book is still listed under the author with the other spelling.)

I'm not sure that was helpful, but I hope it made some sense! :)

[rivka, Former Moderator]

For standardized English transliterations of author's names, check the Library of Congress database.

[تامر]

What about the status of indexing Arabic in your database? Is it an encoding problem or something?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

That's a question for the Feedback group, not really something this group can help with.